here so you can keep what you got.”
Foreman stared through the roiling smoke at McKinley. He nodded slowly, his dark eyes shining wet in the light.
“You should have got straight to the point from the get-go. I understand you now, Horace.”
“Good. It’s just a short walk from here to there.”
“Who we talkin’ about, exactly? And how many?”
“Dewayne. Zulu, I expect.”
“You got some kind of plan?”
“Simple. We walk on over there, cross that DMZ, and knock on their door. Tell ’em we want to give them, what do you call that, one of them olive branches. Tell ’em we want to talk. There’s been too much killin’ lately, can’t we all get along, some bullshit like that. They let us in the house, we take ’em down. Like I said, simple. We outnumber their guns, and we got surprise on our side. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“When?” said Foreman.
McKinley said, “They’re over there right now.”
Foreman stood out of his chair, dropped his cigar to the scarred hardwood floor, and crushed it under his shoe. He released the safeties on both of his guns, reholstered the revolver, racked the slide on his Colt.9, reholstered it, and straightened out his leather.
“We gonna talk all night,” said Foreman, “or we gonna do this thing?”
“Damn, big man,” said McKinley, “you make a decision, you don’t fuck around.”
“You the one made the decision, Hoss. I’m just a man with a couple of guns.”
MARIO Durham lay on his back. The bullet had taken out the bridge of his nose and one of his eyes. His hat was still fitted to his head, which rested on the street in a river of blood.
“He looks real casual, doesn’t he?” said Nathan Grady. “Like he just laid down in the street to take a nap. I like the way he’s got his hand in his pocket, too, don’t you? Except for his face, you wouldn’t even know he was dead.”
Strange and Quinn were inside the yellow crime tape, standing beside Grady. Kids and adults from the neighborhood were behind the tape, some talking to uniformed officers, some laughing, some just staring at something that would give them bad dreams later that night. The photographers and forensics team were still working over the body and had not yet covered Mario up.
“Why is he like that?” said Quinn.
“My guess is the bullet severed his cerebral cortex,” said Grady. “When that happens it freezes the victim at the moment of death. I’ve seen it before. Mario was probably standing on the corner, his hand in his pocket, when he took the bullet. He died instantly, I’d say.”
“Standing on the corner doing what?” said Strange.
“Well, one of the locals said they saw little Mario there earlier in the evening, looked like he was selling something, or trying to. When we get into his pockets we’ll find out.”
“He got killed over drugs?”
“Could be. Looks like an amateur killing. A pro wouldn’t put a forty-five to a man’s head. I mean, a twenty-two would have been sufficient, right? One thing’s for sure: He didn’t get killed for his sneakers. You see ’em?” Grady laughed. “My man here is sportin’ a pair of ‘ordans.’ Or maybe I’m missing something and that’s the rage these days.”
Strange and Quinn did not comment.
“Anyway, he’s dead. Justice in Drama City, right? Thought you guys would want to see him. For closure and all that.”
“You call his kin?” said Strange.
“His brother, the drug dealer. He’s coming down in a while to ID the body. I’m gonna let him tell their mother.”
“Thanks for calling us,” said Strange.
“Yeah, sure. Take care.”
Grady motioned to the photographer, indicating that he should take another picture of the corpse. Strange guessed that the photograph of a bloody Mario Durham, “sleeping” in the street with his hand slipped into his pocket, would soon be hanging on Grady’s wall.
Strange and Quinn ducked the crime tape and walked to their cars.
“Get in for a minute, Terry,” said Strange, nodding at his Caprice. “I want to talk to you before we go home.”
DEWAYNE Durham looked out the back window at the alley and the house on Yuma. The house was all lit up inside, and McKinley was standing in the kitchen with a man, big like him but muscular, not fat.
“Foreman,” said Durham. He raised his voice. “Bernard, better get in here.”
Soon Durham felt Walker behind him, looking over his shoulder.
“That’s Foreman, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck’s goin’ on?”
“I don’t know. But they’re leavin’ the house.”
“Maybe they’re just goin’ to their car.”
“You see either one of their cars out in that alley?”
Durham heard Walker pull back the receiver of his Glock and ease a round into the chamber of the gun.
“They’re comin’ over here,” said Walker.
Durham watched them cross the alley. His fingers grazed the grip of his gun. “He ain’t hidin’ nothin’, either.”
“I can smoke ’em both, they get close enough.”
“Before you do that,” said Durham, “let’s see what they got on their minds.”
Chapter 34
THE overheads of cruisers flashed the crime scene and threw colored light upon the faces of Strange and Quinn. A meat wagon had arrived for Mario Durham, and its driver was leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette. The neighborhood crowd had begun to break up and many were walking the sidewalks back to their homes. Some kids had set up a board-and-cinder-block ramp in the street and they were taking turns jumping it with their bikes.
“Same old circus,” said Strange, looking through the windshield from behind the wheel of the Caprice. He was holding his cell phone, flipping its cover open and closed.
“You feel robbed?”
“A little. In my heart I know I shouldn’t, but there it is.”
“
“Well, we’re not the law. They do have a little bit of an advantage on us. Anyway, we got the girl and her kid to a safe place. That was something.”
“Not enough for me. I’d feel a whole lot better if I’d accomplished something.”
“There’s always tomorrow.”
“I was thinkin’ you’d come with me over to Naylor before we head back to Northwest. Talk to those boys about Linda Welles.”
